


mountain moving

by owlinaminor



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:40:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27698423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: Yuuri skates like he is asking Victor to kiss him.
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Comments: 9
Kudos: 119





	mountain moving

**Author's Note:**

> local homosexual rewatches yuri on ice, writes victor character study. very big never been done before.
> 
> title / epigraph from [rio grande by the oh hellos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar97AH0CMxo&ab_channel=TheOhHellos).

> _If I’m a mountain moving,  
>  I think maybe, you can be, too._

Victor wants to kiss him.

And it should be that easy, shouldn’t it? Victor wants. He bends the world like this: reaching out, curling his fingers towards his palm so elegant that gold medals fall into place at the center. He keeps all his medals polished, in a drawer of his bedside table, wrapped in a scarf that he bought at an outdoor market once, he doesn’t remember which country, only that it was after a competition and Yakov made fun of him for looking like a babushka at thirteen. The scarf is ugly now, red faded to a dull maroon, but it does its job. The medals still shine.

Victor does not bring them to Japan.

Victor wants to kiss him.

Has wanted to, really, since the dancing started. All those limbs flying out and reaching. Yuuri Katsuki is good with his hands: he knows how to stretch them, palm up, fingers arched back as though defying the gravity that would pull them down.

_I heard he trained in ballet before he started skating,_ Mila says, sidling up beside Victor and handing him another glass of champagne.

Victor downs it, lets the bubbles fizz impatient in his throat and wishes for something stronger. He never liked vodka as much as he was supposed to, but a whiskey, perhaps, a bourbon. Something to give him liftoff.

Yuuri Katusuki moves his body like music, like he doesn’t need a rink to skate. He finishes the dance-off, emerges breathless and squinting, and pulls Victor in.

Victor wants to kiss him.

He watches the video again, the night after he gets to Hasetsu. Tiny Yuuri twirling on a tiny screen. He skates like a mirror, like he’s watching Victor on the ice beneath him, or on the inside of his eyelids. Reflecting. The ice beneath him is cracked, faded after hundreds of jumps and spins and kids crashing into the wall, but Yuuri glides across as though it is polished gold. His arms extend, his head lifts, and when he jumps it seems almost like an accident—as though the music pulls him, he has no choice.

Victor never watches his own performances—he always finds mistakes. But this, Yuuri in his program, Yuuri even as he stumbles, is incandescent. Victor wants to push him, just to see how he keeps his balance. Victor wants to melt the ice beneath him, just to see if he learns to swim.

Yuuri is asleep in the next room somewhere, still warm from the baths. Victor wonders, if he pressed his cheek to the thin wall, could he hear Yuuri breathing? Could he feel Yuuri’s warmth?

Victor wants to kiss him.

The ocean is beautiful, of course—the clear blue-green, stretching out forever like an old landscape painting only three dimensional, he can taste the salt—but Victor has seen it a hundred times, or at least every morning since he got to Hasetsu. He watches how the ocean looks on Yuuri. His hair, ruffled by the wind, those terrible bangs pulled off his forehead. His cheeks, gone pink in the cold. His eyes, sparkling.

He never goes swimming here, he told Victor last week. He hates having to walk all the way back to the baths after to wash the sand off. Yuuri hates being cold, but he loves the ice, where he is always warm.

Last week, they sat here, and Yuuri asked Victor to be himself. Victor looks at him now, and he wants—to be himself, yes, and to be himself is to pull Yuuri’s warmth out from beneath his skin, to pull him open and show the world how he shines in the sun.

_Yuuri,_ Victor says. His breath hitches in his throat.

Yuuri turns, and looks back.

Victor wants to kiss him.

During the free skate, yes, the ice blinding, and in the dark stairwell beforehand. _Stand by me, believe I can do it._ Yuuri Katsuki moves his body like music, like he was not born to do this but rather decided it, somewhere deep in his bones. Between the falls and the tears, his feet are composing.

Victor wishes he paid better attention in primary school, suddenly, when they taught poetry. He had to memorize a verse by Pushkin, something about a snowstorm. He left the book on the edge of the rink during a break in practice, and when he returned Yakov was reading aloud from the page, making Victor echo every syllable. Victor pronounced it perfectly in class the next day, then let the book fall in a puddle on his way home.

Something about a snowstorm. The way the wind moves, the way it howls. Sometimes like a beast, sometimes like a child. Yuuri Katsuki moves his body like the wind on a starry night in Saint Petersburg, like he read every line of Pushkin until they sank into his skin. Victor watches him, and Victor wants—to read poetry, to dance ballets, to sing operas, to run through the park by the river and scream into the wind.

He does the quad flip. Victor is surprised, and not surprised. Yuuri was always going to push himself like this, and Victor was always going to pull him closer.

Victor wants to kiss him.

He sees Yuuri through the glass, and it’s like sunrise over the ocean: all the light converging. Yuuri’s eyes widen, and he pulls his mask down, and he starts running—all these coats and scarves holding him down but the grace is the same, the lines of his shoulders and back steady like they were on the ice. Victor watched him on the television at Ice Castle Hasetsu, and then when he couldn’t watch, he took the rink and skated Yuuri’s program. Closed his eyes, just at the peak of the quads, and heard Yuuri jumping beside him.

Space is funny, on the rink. So is time. Everything expands, and contracts as you reach out to grab it. Yuuri starts running, Victor joins him, their reflections racing until they meet. Yuuri steps out of his coats and scarves and says, _stay with me until I retire._

And Victor takes his hand, holds him steady.

Victor wants to kiss him.

That damned press conference is on again, part of some kind of highlight reel for Yuuri’s season. Yuuri buries his face in his hands, but it’s still visible: the very tips of his ears have gone pink.

_I still don’t know what you’re saying here,_ Victor tells him. He’s asked Yuko and Minako, but they both refused to translate, said he should just ask Yuuri.

Yuuri turns his head, his hair falling on the table. _Really?_

_You were speaking Japanese,_ Victor says.

Yuuri looks up at himself on the screen, that strange expression on his face like he’s about to turn a triple into a quad.

And then he starts speaking in English, along with the emphatic, larger-than-life Yuuri on the screen. Victor has to strain at first to hear both Yuuris, but then the words become clear, his mouth drops open.

Yuuri reaches for the remote and switches the screen off, then turns to Victor. He’s smiling, sheepish but with this glow in his cheeks, the aftermath of his blush.

_I know,_ he says. _I said too much._

And Victor reaches—takes Yuuri’s chin in his hand. Warm, trembling breath. _Say it again,_ he whispers, and he leans in.

Victor wants to kiss him.

The hotel beds are narrow—wider when they’re pushed together. They are deep mattresses, white comforters piled on top like snow. Yuuri lies buried beneath his blanket and half of Victor’s, just his head poking out, his hair disheveled. Everyone says it looks sexy slicked back but Victor likes it best like this: softer, without pretense.

Victor reaches out and runs his index finger across Yuuri’s forehead—warm, as though he’s absorbed the hot springs of Hasetsu and brought them along to Barcelona. He leans into Victor’s touch.

Victor never liked hotel rooms, when he traveled alone. He’d go out, explore the city, eat and drink and dance with Chris or the rest of the Russian skaters until his feet hurt. He’d fall into bed with shoes still on.

Now, he listens to Yuuri’s breathing, and thinks, _this is how he’ll skate tomorrow._ Even, natural, close to me.

Victor wants to kiss him.

Like he doesn’t need to think about it, like breathing. Yuuri spins across the ice, glittering with the cold, and every swing of his arms, every push of his feet, is a bell chiming, is fingers across a piano, is violins and trumpets and timpani. He lands the jumps because he has to. He lands the jumps because Victor is jumping alongside him.

It never used to feel like this. Victor would take the ice, his reflection would take him, and that would be it. Yuuri takes the ice, and takes, and takes, until the rink has melted beneath him and he is swimming in the ocean off Hasetsu, salt in his hair and his skin pink and warm.

Yuuri skates like he is asking Victor to kiss him. And Victor will, he will, he will.

**Author's Note:**

> the snowstorm poem victor remembers is pushkin's [зимний вечер](https://lyricstranslate.com/en/%D0%B7%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9-%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%80-winter-evening.html).
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor) / [tumblr](https://owlinaminor.tumblr.com/)


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